Trees in flower with brilliant red, white and yellow canopies shade a group of farmers picking coffee beans. Four oxen peacefully pull a wagon filled with coffee, potatoes and beans over the hilly slopes. On the veranda of a house, two women scrape the peel from the cassava tubers that they just harvested and toss it aside for the goats to feast on. These sounds softly echo in the green valley, giving a sensation of remote, isolated tranquillity. It seems as if time has stood still and people’s lives have gone unchanged for generations. This is far from the truth. This place, in the Zona da Mata in Minas Gerais, Brazil, is marked by a continuous fight against soil degradation, dependencies on external inputs, and exploitation by landlords, multinational traders and chemical manufacturers. It is a struggle for autonomy. By establishing control over land and re-designing food and farming systems farmers are moving towards food sovereignty.

Land sovereignty

One of the villages in the Zona da Mata that moved towards food sovereign-ty is Araponga. In the past, many farmers in Araponga had no land and worked in sharecropping arrange-ments to produce coffee. They did all the work for only part of the harvest, at the whim of the landlord. They had no say over what to cultivate or how to cultivate the land. From the 1970s onwards, landlords began to implement many of the principles and technologies of the Green Revolution. As a result, sharecroppers were obliged to use agro-toxins, forbidden to grow food crops, and had to weed the land until it was bare.

Things changed in the 1980s when neighbouring families organised themselves in small dynamic groups, each composed of five to 20 families called the Comunidades Eclesiais de Base (CEBs, Basic Ecclesial Communities). These families would meet to pray and sing, and engage in politically-oriented readings of the Bible. The CEBs were linked to the broader Liberation Theology movement that was occurring within the Catholic Church throughout Latin America at that time.

So, we were on our land; we had all the freedom but no harvest

During these discussions, sharecrop farmers began to challenge the status quo. They founded the Arapongan Rural Workers Union to protect the rights of sharecroppers and rural workers. At the same time, farmers affirmed that autonomy could not be attained in a sharecropping arrangement, but only as landowners. This marked the beginning of the Arapongan Joint Land Conquest Movement. Mediated by the union, farmers formed groups and pooled their resources to collectively buy land. They set up lending schemes through which group members could borrow money from other members. Between 1989 and 2010 more than 700 hectares were purchased by more than 150 families. This also led to the return of Arapongans who had migrated to the slums of São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. Drawn by the movement’s successes, they came back to Araponga to purchase land and make a living as farmers.

The movement for Alternative Agriculture

Nevertheless, while having control over land, the settlers soon found that this did not bring the autonomy they had envisaged. Green Revolution practices had become the default mode of farming in the region. Such practices, including mono-cropping, specialisation in coffee and plough-ing, were leading to land degradation and resulting in yield declines. “So, we were on our own land. We had all the freedom but no harvest,” says João, one of the farmers in the region. The increasing prices of chemical fertilizers on one hand, and of the food in stores on the other squeezed farmers’ income even further. Farmers knew they had to free themselves from the chains of the Green Revolution. But how?

At the time, the Green Revolution started to meet resistance from other sides. Brazil was undergoing a process of re-democratisation. Now that self-organisation was no longer banned, a new generation of civil society organisations was flourishing, including the growing movement for Alternative Agriculture, later coined agroecology.

At the Federal University of Viçosa, located near Araponga, alternative agriculture was also gaining ground. A group of recent graduates approached farmers about working together, and in 1988, the Centre of Alternative Technologies of the Zona da Mata (CTA-ZM) was founded, together with 13 rural worker unions in the region. This moment also marked the birth of new partnership in the Zona da Mata: between the CTA-ZM, the Federal University of Viçosa and numerous peasant organisations, including the Arapongan farmers’ union. The alliance proved important in terms of acquiring support, obtaining legitimacy, fostering experimentation and learning, and stimulating innovation.

Farmers began to cultivate a higher diversity of food crops and fruits

Nested markets

At the Federal University of Viçosa, located near Araponga, alternative agriculture was also gaining ground. A group of recent graduates approached farmers about working together, and in 1988, the Centre of Alternative Technologies of the Zona da Mata (CTA-ZM) was founded, together with 13 rural worker unions in the region. This moment also marked the birth of new partnership in the Zona da Mata: between the CTA-ZM, the Federal University of Viçosa and numerous peasant organisations, including the Arapongan farmers’ union. The alliance proved important in terms of acquiring support, obtaining legitimacy, fostering experimentation and learning, and stimulating innovation.

And there were more experiments. Farmers began to cultivate more and a higher diversity of food crops (e.g. cassava, maize, beans and vegetables) and fruits (e.g. mango, avocado, banana and papaya). Some of these were cultivated as part of an agroforestry system. Soon, food processing started. For example, sugar cane was processed into raw sugar, avocado into soap, milk into cheese and maize and cassava into flour. Farmers’ diets gradually improved and they became much less dependent on purchased food. As one farmer said: “In the time of my father’s generation we experienced no hunger, but we did not have the variety of food that we have now.”

Many of these farmers nowadays produce a surplus of food. Together with CTA and UFV, they created so called ‘nested markets’. These are local markets that are governed by farmers’ and citizens’ own values, where farmers can sell their surplus. A farmer shop was established in the centre of the town of Araponga and an open farmers’ market is now organised every week. Market networks where farmers could sell directly to citizens in the larger city of Viçosa were also set up. Urban people value these markets because products are fresh, free from pesticides, and inexpensive. One farmer said, “we did not know that the people in Araponga ate so many bananas.” Urban citizens in Araponga used to buy bananas from external markets.

A way of life

Today, the agroecology alliance continues to struggle against corporate control over production and consumption by strengthening and creating nested markets, and by fostering innovation and exchange between farmers, researchers and activists. They work in Araponga and many other municipalities in the Zona da Mata. Together with other movements, united under the National Agro-ecology Articulation (ANA), they run awareness raising campaigns. They also advocate for public policies that reward farmers who produce environmental or social benefits for society and call for regulations that put limits on agro-industry and their destructive effects on public health, the environment and the farming community.

In Araponga, moving towards food sovereignty was a two-pronged process of gaining control over land and redesigning farming to be independent from dominant markets and technologies. It was through self-organisation, the pooling of resources, forging partnerships with other organisations and (re)connecting with nature that, a seemingly powerless group of sharecroppers took the food and farming system into their own hands.

They gained the capacity to re-establish control over, and re-design these systems. Crucial in this process was the establishment of an institutional environment that protected farmers from external interests, that enabled them to experiment and innovate with agroecology and that guarded the peace, nature, and ways of life that flourish in the Arapongan countryside.

Leonardo van den Berg (Leonardo.vandenberg@gmail.com), Magriet Goris, and Heitor Mancini Teixeira are PhD candidates at the Federal University of Viçosa conducting action research embedded in the agroecology movement. Irene Cardoso and Izabel Maria Botelho are professors at the same university. Irene is also chair of the Brazilian Agroecology Association and a board member of ILEIA.

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“My name is Léocadie Voho. I am 51 years old. I have seven children and 11 granddaughters. I live in Tienhoula, a prefecture of Duékoué, in west Ivory Coast. When I joined 24 other female cocoa farmers in discussing our position as women in our country’s certified cocoa sector, we could really see our situation with new eyes.

We worked with researchers, film makers and the Fairtrade organization to make a film about our work and our lives. We first started filling in a seasonal calendar, including our daily schedule. When we compared our calendars, we realised that we really work a lot. But then we saw that the real problem is not how much we work but the price of cocoa and the money we get for it. When we sell the cocoa, I should have my share to feed my family. But the men sell the cocoa and I get nothing. Trade isn’t fair after all.

We learned how to shoot with the video camera, and how to make a script. We made a script about our experience with cocoa and how the money doesn’t make it home. It was in making this film that we realised we could change the situation. In practice it means talking to your husband or son about the changes you want. We also want to persuade the men to let us have our own land to cultivate – that would make a difference!

Making this film gave us the opportunity to discuss our possibilities with each other, and with different kinds of people with different ideas. I hope that this film can motivate and mobilise all the women in our situation to make changes in their lives. By sharing our experiences about our situation in cocoa production we created new knowledge together about how to make change. We not only learned how to film but also how to raise our voices.”

Interview by Margriet Goris, independent researcher at Wageningen University (The Netherlands) and documentary film maker.

Watch Léocadie Voho and other female cocoa farmers in their self-made film ‘Growing our Cocoa, Raising our Voices’

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As the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food (2008-14), Olivier De Schutter has spoken out many times on the urgent need for changes in global food systems. In March 2014 he published his final report, making strong recommendations in favour of agroecology.

Why do you recommend supporting small scale farmers?

We know that small farms are very productive, and more so than large monocropping farms per unit area of cultivated land. The confusion arises because we calculate output only by looking at the commodities that these large farms deliver. And yes they are productive, but small farms combine different outputs and are much more efficient in the way they use resources.

Taking into account all the different products, yields from a small farm can be very impressive. The key problem is that we have developed a situation with industrial farming systems where we have become addicted to fossil fuels and have accelerated greenhouse gas emissions as a result. Food systems have become highly dependent on petrol, but we’re running out of oil. So in the future they may not be sustainable.

We need alternatives, and there are good arguments from the points of view of resource efficiency and resilience to support food systems that are much more agroecological and make much better use of our natural resources.

How is agroecology linked to the right to food?

First, agroecology is not the same as organic agriculture. It means understanding how nature works, to replicate the complementarities between plants, trees and animals and the natural workings of nature on your farm in order to reduce dependency on external inputs such as chemical fertilizer. This is a sustainable way of producing food as it preserves the ability of future generations to feed themselves. It supports the health of the soil much better, reduces dependency on fossil energies, and is also a low cost way of farming. So for farmers in developing countries who have little access to credit and who are much more vulnerable to risk than farmers in developed countries, agroecology is a very interesting solution for agricultural development.

You say production systems should respond to ‘needs’ and not ‘demands’.

Indeed. The problem is that once food is a commodity that responds to the laws of supply and demand, it will serve only the needs of those who have the greatest purchasing power. In other words, it will not serve the basic needs of the poorest people who have no money or not enough money to spend. Food production will be geared towards satisfying the tastes of the richest segments of the population.

Markets for land and water are increasingly global and populations with widely diverging purchasing powers in the North and the South that have to compete for the same resources. This is creating a paradox in which the luxury tastes of some parts of the world’s population are satisfied whereas the basic needs of others are not recognised and cannot be satisfied.

What is the role of consumers in changing food systems?

Consumers have much more power than they generally acknowledge, and I am hopeful that this next generation will make choices that are much more responsible and informed about the social and environmental impacts of their ways of purchasing and consuming food. In fact, 15 years ago, very few people had concerns other than to have a large diversity of cheap food available all year round. Now people are much more attentive to the impacts of their purchasing practices and they ask questions about labour rights, sustainability, food miles, et cetera. I think it’s a good thing. Does it go far enough? Maybe not. In part because it still only concerns a relatively small part of the population, the best informed and the most aware. And also because we have to accept that consuming more responsibly, also means consuming less of certain things and less meat in particular.

We are coming to realise our overconsumption of meat has a huge impact on natural resources, making land and water more scarce. Our current level of meat consumption in the EU is 75 kg per person per year on average. This is far too much for the environment and also creates a range of health problems. So a move towards healthier lifestyles and changes in how we consume food are desirable and perhaps on the horizon.

Why is access to land so important?

For many years we thought there was plenty of land available and that there would be no competition for this resource. But the 2008 global food price crisis drew the attention of many governments to the need for securing access to land because global markets were not sufficiently reliable.

There was interest for farmland not just from governments but also from private investors. This led to what many call ‘land grabbing’. Huge areas were bought or leased from 2008 to 2011, though the trend is declining slightly now. So land has become a commodity for which there is competition.

The problem is that in many regions, those who use and depend on the land for their livelihoods have no secure access to it. They risk being priced out from land markets and being evicted from the land on which they depend because someone with more purchasing power can buy it instead of them. It is becoming a serious problem, including for younger generations in industrialised countries.

Access to land for them is becoming problematic, just like for peasants in the global South. Because of the inflation in land prices, it’s becoming very difficult for 25 year-olds to start in farming today unless their parents were farmers.

For young farmers in the European Union, it is hard to enter into farming because land and machinery is becoming so expensive. It is therefore necessary to have programmes to improve access to land and to credit, and to ensure that land is used by those who treat it best.

What policies are needed for fairer and more sustainable food systems?

We need policies that are much more coherent from the local to the global. I see many examples of local food systems being rebuilt, with consumers being more active, linking with producers and supported by municipalities. Local resources can be better used to shape food systems that are more sustainable and fair for both consumers and producers. However, very often, such local initiatives are not supported by national policies or by the global framework.

Most of the time, national agricultural policies do not pay attention to local dimensions of food systems. And the global framework supports the expansion of export-led agriculture but does not support governments to take into account dimensions of food systems other than those that increase production volumes. We need more coherence across different levels of governance and much more food democracy. People must be able to hold governments accountable for the results of what food systems deliver. There is a need to move agricultural policies into food policies so that these other dimensions are taken into account. That is why issues of governance are key in achieving the transition towards sustainable food systems.

In which international body should trade in food and agriculture be discussed?

There was an attempt in the past four to five years to improve the coherence of different sectoral policies that affect global food security. That led to a reform of the Committee on World Food Security that convenes in Rome under the auspices of the FAO (the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations). It is a widely representative committee, including all governments, all international agencies with a relationship to food and agriculture, the private sector, NGOs and farmers organisations, who work together to deliver recommendations for governments.

It is my hope that in future, this committee, because it is inclusive and transparent, can have greater influence in shaping reforms at global and national levels. Unfortunately, trade is very much off limits, and the committee is not authorised to discuss in any depth the impact of trade policies on food security. This is all under the mandate of the WTO (World Trade Organization).

I think that this is a mistake, and this should be seen as part of the problem. It makes no sense to discuss agricultural investment, food security and climate change and not to discuss trade, as it has such a huge impact on the shaping of agricultural and food policies.

Interview: Margriet Goris

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